Just heard a quick blurb on BBC that another panel fell off a Boeing mid-flight which landed in Oregon. No harm done… wasn’t noticed until after they landed. United Airlines....
I think you’re right. In one of the articles I posted, an apparent Boeing insider demanded exiting a 737 Max upon finding it was that specific aircraft model that he boarded.
But the problem is not just with the nuts and bolts. A PBC documentary did a deep probe on the #737max. We have to accept that engineers make mistakes. But what I do NOT accept is managers making the deliberate calculated decision to coverup the mistakes to the extent of proactively consciously deciding not to train Boeing pilots on the KNOWN flaws and idiosyncracies to save money. Lives were lost because of these management decisions – which are the same managers who lives depend on w.r.t. the older Boeing aircraft as well. These decisions also lead to under-trained Boeing pilots.
The 737 Max will probably go through copious scrutiny. But even if they make every nut, bolt, and sensor quite safe, that does nothing for the shitty infrastructure of right-wing business people who will continue working to pinch every penny for their shareholders.
I would love to see a dated line graph of the historic and current pay rate of Boeing test pilots with annotations on each incident.
Yeah but we wouldn’t want positive news that promotes them… so the headline would need to be “A full week passed without a Boeing problem… could this be a turning point?”
I wouldn’t give a shit if someone shoplifts from (e.g.) Whole Foods (aka Amazon). But then WTF am I doing in there in the 1st place if I have a problem with that store?
Ethical consumers boycott the worst companies and patronize the lesser of evils. We don’t feed the stores we have contempt for in the first place, so there is never a circumstance where I would witness a shoplift from a shitty merchant. When I see a shoplift happening, it would generally only be in a shop that I consider relatively progressive and decent (one that I chose to set foot in).
BTW, I can’t do videos so apologies if I’m missing the context. Just replied to the title.
I don’t imagine that Whole Foods is for poor people, but I’ve not been in there for a long time. I recall that it was higher end, and yet unethical at the same time once Amazon became the owner.
You have enough financial security that you can buy from “ethical” stores even if they’re more expensive than other options.
In the grocery markets, that does not seem to be the case. I’m now well outside Whole Foods regions and shop on a tight budget and see good deals at all the grocers (those I boycott and those I don’t). I’ve made somewhat a game of eating cheaply. For the past year, my daily food cost is ¾ the cost of a Big Mac. And yet I still manage to (what some would consider) over-eat.
You have reliable enough transportation that you can get to “ethical” stores even if they aren’t within walking distance or on public transit lines.
I’m in the city. There are mom & pop grocers walking distance from my house. Apart from that I can reach all shops by bicycle about equally.
You have the time, and energy, and information resources, to identify what stores meet your ethical code and what don’t.
Grocers are different in this regard. I take the time to dig up dirt on tech companies but identifying bad grocers doesn’t require time and effort. The info just comes to you. I see “boycott store X” in graffiti all over town along with a dedicated URL for it. I don’t think grocers need any kind of deep probing, AFAICT. Most of my extensive ethics research is on brands that are in the shops. Every shop has Nestlé, Unilever, Proctor & Gamble, etc.
That’s all privilege. You realize that’s all privilege, right?
This doesn’t obviate anything I said. It’s orthogonal to the issue. Your mind was boggled because customers rat out shoplifters. I unboggled it. There is not enough price variation from one grocer to another that would push poor consumers one direction or the other depending on their budgets. There are some small boutique-eske bio shops which have higher prices but that’s not where I’m drawing lines.
What you’re saying is more of what I see with online shopping. Poor people need Amazon. I boycott Amazon. OTOH, I’ve chosen a simple life and hardly buy anything non-essential anyway, unless it’s 2nd hand from the street markets.
I’ve been boycotting PayPal for at least a decade, so I am somewhat out of touch with how they operate. Out of the blue, I received a call at a phone number paypal would not know I had. A bot said:...
I deliberately omitted those two. Notice I said “in the free decentralized world”. The sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world nodes should not be promoted because they are centralized (by two factors) and antithetical to the purpose of the fedi.
factor 1: disproportionate size thus concentration of power by those admins over an unacceptably large population.
factor 2: cloudflare, who currently decides who gets access to ~20—30% of all websites in the world. CF abuses their power and they marginalize several demographics of people (including poor people who live in regions where ISPs have to use CGNAT).
So I suggest not feeding those communities. It might be interesting to replicate their content here in such a way that it doesn’t link back to them.
It’s worth noting as well that Cloudflare’s breakage proliferates when CF’d nodes crosspost outside of their walled garden. E.g. if a CF-sourced image is crossposted to slrpnk.net, the image is inaccessible to me (and everyone else CF excludes) so I get a half missing post. Many people are here in the sufficiently decentralized portion of the fedi to escape abuses of concentrated power.
Yeah it would be nice if it were organised to some extent, like crossposting everything between the two for redundancy since each node would have different lifetimes, but get people to comment in just one. Though the rules are different. The German one bans all advertising.
You could fill a book on the harm Cloudflare does. To describe the walled garden, they have designed Cloudflare without a login so that people in the included group don’t even know they are participating in digital exclusion and supporting a walled garden by a tech giant. The gate is invisible. Those of us in the excluded group see a deceptive block screen that says it’s doing a security check but in reality it’s doing nothing but showing a non-stop spinner. Some people get a CAPTCHA which is often broken (always broken for me).
By default, Cloudflare blocks access to the following groups of people:
users whose ISP uses CGNAT to distribute a limited range of IPv4 addresses (this generally impacts poor people in impoverished regions)
the Tor community
VPN users
users of public libraries, and generally networks where IP addresses are shared
blind people who disable images in their browsers (which triggers false positives for robots, as scripts are generally not interested in images either)
the permacomputing community and people on limited internet connections, who also disable browser images to reduce bandwidth which makes them appear as bots
people who actually run bots – Cloudflare is outspokenly anti-robot and treats beneficial bots the same as malicious bots
If you are in the included group and get access to a Cloudflare site, CF is a man in the middle who sees all the traffic. The padlock you see only means that your traffic is secure from you to Cloudflare (not to the host you think you are visiting). Cloudflare sees your userid and password, your DMs, everything. CF has grown to take ~20—30% of the web. So probably around roughly ¼ of your web activity is all seen by that one corporation which operates in a country without privacy safegards. So in addition to the above list of groups of people who Cloudflare blocks from web access, there is a group of privacy enthusiasts who block CF as they refuse to disclose ~25% of their web traffic to CF.
As for the disproportionate size, I think that is somewhat inevitable, even with a Federated platform.
It’s only inevitable to the extent that it’s inevitable that you will have admins who don’t grasp the philosophy. Admins who embrace the principles of decentralization close registration before their user count gets excessive (lemmy.ml demonstrated some restraint in this regard though some would say they should have closed reg sooner). Others will carry on, and bring in Cloudflare to supercharge the capacity which brings the problem that Cloudflare itself is centralized. They have effectively joined the centralized walled garden and brought a disproportionately large number of unwitting users into that exclusive venue. I say “unwitting” because sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world does not disclose to the users the fact that they are in a walled garden and that they share all the traffic with a US tech giant. Their greed is why there are disproportionately small nodes. It is sh.itjust.works and lemmy.world who decided to exploit all the individuals who individually decide they want to be in the same place where everyone else is, which ruins the balance and keeps small nodes overly small.
Many posts are in a Q&A format, and if a bot were to crosspost all the content here, any answers here wouldn’t necessarily make it back to the OP. Had you considered this?
I didn’t necessarily mean to imply that a bot would do the job, but indeed a bot would make sense. The purpose of copying traffic out of the centralized walled garden into a free world instance would be to feed info to those who have chosen the ethical venue. The purpose would not be to feed the giants in any way. So if it’s a personal question post that does not enrich the commons with information then the post could be removed by the bot operator. Or if the question likely provokes an interesting chat then it could be left alone. Responders who want the OP to see the response could simply mention them in the response and the OP would get a notification.
More often than not, admins are interested in alternatives. When they hear there are no gratis alternatives, they shut down. CF is deceptively gratis. That is, the gratis plan is for relatively low consumption. When a service comes under attack which then leverages the defense admins signed up for, Cloudflare taps them on the shoulder and says: hey, you’re exceeding the bandwidth of the gratis plan… time to switch to premium. So the “free” evaporates.
Slightly more clever admins will use CF DNS and maintain their site in a non-proxied state (sparing their users from Cloudflare exclusion and over-sharing). Then when an attack hits they just have to flip a switch and CF is put into play. That switch can even be scripted to happen automatically.
Even more clever admins (e.g. infosec.pub) are very knowledgeable about how to do security properly without offloading their security problems onto everyone else.
I don’t really know the guy but I’m sure he is quite busy. He also runs infosec.exchange and a Threads-defederated variant of that, and an onion mirror, and fedia.io. fedia.io is on kbin/mbin and thus very buggy and he seems to put a lot of energy into chasing those bugs. IIRC he mentioned his bills are like $3k/month for one of or all of those nodes. Wouldn’t hurt to ask but the question should probably come direct from the interested admins. Maybe they could hire him.
If you scroll down to Torleif Stumo there’s a quite interesting story. I was amazed that an aircraft that started to taxi returned to the gate and reconnected to let a passenger exit who discovered he was on a 737 max – and that the airline rebooked him at no extra cost. Then I realized after my speed-reading what I missed:...
I’m not sure why you would draw the line between between Max and non-Max. The Max has the biggest embarrassment largely because of the faulty AoA sensors but as @corsicanguppy was implying, the 737 Max will likely undergo so much scrutiny that it will be made into something relatively safe (due to having more eyes on it than probably any other aircraft). Every Boeing pilot in the world is probably well aware not to trust the AoA sensor now that lives have been lost due to that sensor.
The big problem is not the product, but the infrastructure and culture of people at Boeing. Boeing is an extremely conservative company hell-bent on profit for the shareholders. This is not just an engineering mistake. It’s about how the faulty sensor was known to Boeing, and Boeing decided to cover it up. Deciding not to train pilots about the known-faulty angle of attack sensor because that training would cost too much.
There are Boeing pilots and then there are Airbus pilots. It’s very rare for a pilot to be trained in both due to the costs. Whenever you fly in a Boeing, your safety is in the hands of that whole Boeing infrastructure – from the engineers who try to make manager decisions (i.e. money saving decisions) to pilots who lack training when Boeing decides something doesn’t require extra specific training.
If you read the article, it’s important to notice Ed Pierson (the first person in the article to demand to get off the plane) had 1st hand exposure to the engineering at Boeing for that aircraft. Not sure what his role was but he was apparently an insider and it’s quite remarkable that he was too skiddish to be a passenger on one.
In Europe the culture is much different. If there is a safety concern or issue you do not even ask the question about the cost of protecting human lives. You just do the necessary. Airbus engineers can also make mistakes, but they would not cover it up or compare the cost of safety to the risk of getting caught neglecting safety.
Ah, I made a bad assumption. I figured you were in the same camp of nixing the Max but not the rest.
The masses just hear repeated headlines of 737 Max failing. Thus they only think the problem is with the nuts and bolts of that aircraft. I highly suggest people watch the hour-long PBS documentary which details the business decisions Boeing makes when a problem becomes known to them. If everyone watched the documentary we would likely see people trying to exit any Boeing aircraft not just the Max.
⚠ Link #enshitification warning: #euronews has a forced agreement type of popup in some browsers (TB). I suggest either Ungoogled Chromium or lynx. Lynx warns “bad html” but it renders fine....
I would love to take the train more, but the train scheduling and ticketing sites are so broken, Tor-hostile, and the infra is somewhat cash-hostile, that I often don’t take the train.
Flying is a little better in this regard because you have many more competitors in ticket sales. Versus trains in Europe where you have the national rail of each country selling tickets plus just ~2-3 third party sites, and in many situations they are all broken (depending on countries involved).
There are dozens if not hundreds of airfare consolidator sites. Most of them are problematic. I can easily find some that do not block Tor so I can at least see the schedules and pricing. But then when I purchase a ticket, it’s often a shit show: I get a msg saying i have a ticket, then the next day i get a notice that my flight was cancelled for no reason (if i’m lucky; sometimes they don’t even tell me they cancelled the ticket). They never tell me why, but after probing it’s often that they don’t like my use of a disposable email address, or that I used Tor, even though the website rejects neither. So it’s a big effort to find the needle in the haystack that works but at least the possibility is there with air travel.
With train sites, consumers with properly defensive browsers are usually blocked from even seeing the fares on all ~2-3 sites that sell tickets. Then there are other shenanigans like online purchase only promos extra fees for cash acceptance.
But I have to say it’s never a plane vs. train choice for me. If I would normally take a train, then usually the bus is the best option w.r.t digital rights and privacy. If crossing the pond, then the flights Spain is cancelling are likely connecting flights for me. So it means I probably won’t be getting flights that connect in Spain unless Spain brings in train codeshares for airlines.
It’s worth noting that the train problems in Europe are relatively well known (some of them, anyway), e.g.:
Train fare from country A to country B will differ on each of the 2 official national websites involved for the very same ticket. So you might benefit from buying from the destination country (in which case of course you must do so online which nixes cash).
Different train scheduling websites show different inventory; you must visit both national ticket sites plus some third party sites to become aware of every possible train.
(Germany) The train app is closed-source & exclusively available from Google/Apple.
(Germany) The train site’s “necessary cookies only” option actually includes many shitty 3rd party surveillance advertisers (thus they mean necessary for business, not technologically necessary). They are being sued for this.
(Germany) Some tickets are only exclusively available through the app. Not all ticket inventory and prices are available at all points of sale. I heard there are some stations where in some situations you’re fucked if you don’t use the app because they are removing kiosks under the nasty assumption that everyone is a happy smartphone-owning patron loyal to Google or Apple.
(Belgium) The only Tor-reachable train data is the irail.be site, which does not show prices and which is missing more than half the inventory.
(Belgium) Weird requirements to get low pricing in some cases. E.g. there are cheap “cross-border” tickets but they can only be bought in a bordering station. So if you want to go from Antwerp or Brussels to Lille, to get the low pricing you must buy your ticket to Tournai (a border station) and then at the Tournai ticket window buy the ticket to Lille (hope the window is open when you arrive!). So you can’t even buy the tickets for all segments in advance.
That’s just a sample of problems in this train shit show. The EU Commission actually tried pushing some legislation to fix problem ① (and I think ② as well) years ago but still today there has been no progress.
So if the Commission can’t fix that mess, what’s Spain to do? Spain needs a stick because the carrot is not working.
Soon those short flights won’t exist as everyone is taking the train.
Even if they fix the train ticketing situation people don’t want the risk of making a separate purchase for the ground portion of their trip. If you miss the plane→train connection or vice versa, you’re fucked. I’m not sure if Spain has train codeshares in place to remedy that. (I forgot what those tickets are called… is it airtrain?) And note as well the codeshares still have the problem that an airline will do an exclusive deal with a train operator. E.g. train-plane itineraries involving CDG are only offered by Air France and for Amsterdam it’s KLM, AFAIK. Which is a kind of monopoly.
It would be more useful to separate individual actions from collective actions. If I want to know what /I can do now/ to ensure I’m doing all I can, the collective stuff is just clutter.
Switch to Ecosia
Ecosia looks like a greenwash to me:
Microsoft syndicate
MS partnered with the absolute worst of the worst oil companies to help them find places to drill for oil (#Chevron and #ExxonMobil) which also feeds the republican party and climate denial lobbyists
Patronizes Amazon for hosting (it’s hard to be more evil than Amazon)
Reverse proxies through Cloudflare who then pushes countless graphical CAPTCHAs (see ¶9)… not to mention being responsible for compromising the privacy of everyone in the world while enshitifying 30% of the web.
Forces use of Paypal so they can sell swag, yet Paypal was caught under estimating their CO₂ footprint by something like 4000%.
Ties to Google, who helps Total Oil find places to dig for oil.
The list just goes on and on… And Ecosia hopes planting some trees will somehow offset the damage of their own existence. Not even close. Mojeek does less environmental harm by far.
Prioritize transit over cars
W.r.t. individual actions public transport doesn’t improve much because public transport systems are also quite harmful. Bicycles are the answer here. I had to take the car → tram step because it’s psychologically harder to make the big change to bicycle. But then eventually realized I could skip the wait at stops by going to bicycle. I wish I had been faster to upgrade from tram to bicycle.
Ride your bicycle instead of the car
Ah, so you had that already… that’s the problem with this list. I guess the public transport prioritization was a collective action.
-More widespread use of contactless payments
Cash is better for the environment. The #WarOnCash is giving far too much power to banks, who also have a huge CO₂ footprint that shadows what the armored trucks do. Those banks are dumping huge amounts of money into oil companies – see the Banking on Climate Chaos report. And see the environmental abuses column on this page. The best move is to use cash for everything.
-Require all office work to be done from home for as much as possible
Suppose it’s the middle of winter or middle of summer and 1000 employees work in an insulated energy efficient commercial building. Sending 1000 people home to heat or cool 1000 uninsulated homes is not favorable, even if those homes have heat pumps. Teleworking likely only makes sense during moderate climate times of the year.
-Improve insulation in older buildings
Perhaps a rule that employees who live in a passive home or heavily insulated home can telework all year long would inspire that.
Increase energy efficient standards with new houses with solar panels mandatory
I heard Belgium has mandated that all new builds must be a passive, meaning the not just insulated but designed with big south facing windows and everything necessary to not even need a heating or cooling system. They go as far as not even allowing a windowsill to act as a thermal bridge. Whereas in much of the US people haven’t even heard the term passive house. I spoke to a real estate agent who never heard of a passive house but he was confident that no such house existed in his state.
Someone living in a significantly sized city in the US could not find a single roofer who could install a vegetated roof. So what do you do there? Ideally roofers would get asked for a vegetated roof often enough that they come to realize they should adapt.
The world is running out of sand
I can hardly believe I’m not joking. And there’s chatter that “we are addicted to sand” (like the oil mantra)....
Boeing- another panel fell off
Just heard a quick blurb on BBC that another panel fell off a Boeing mid-flight which landed in Oregon. No harm done… wasn’t noticed until after they landed. United Airlines....
i understand security doing their (shitty) job. but it boggles my mind how customers inform on each other for free. just for the joy of licking boot (slrpnk.net)
Paypal users: does Paypal call you to confirm purchases?
I’ve been boycotting PayPal for at least a decade, so I am somewhat out of touch with how they operate. Out of the blue, I received a call at a phone number paypal would not know I had. A bot said:...
Another Buy it for Life community (for the sidebar)
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/7480359...
BifL bicycle: SUGG in Brussels, Belgium
cross-posted from: slrpnk.net/post/3235018...
Boeing 737 Max: The passengers boycotting the embattled airplane (edition.cnn.com)
If you scroll down to Torleif Stumo there’s a quite interesting story. I was amazed that an aircraft that started to taxi returned to the gate and reconnected to let a passenger exit who discovered he was on a 737 max – and that the airline rebooked him at no extra cost. Then I realized after my speed-reading what I missed:...
“Why electric bikes actually give more exercise than pedal bikes” ← click bait, slightly misleading, but interesting points nonetheless (beehaw.org)
Not sure if commuting really counts as “travel” related but hopefully it’s interesting enough.
Spain bans short-haul flights where you can take a train (www.euronews.com)
⚠ Link #enshitification warning: #euronews has a forced agreement type of popup in some browsers (TB). I suggest either Ungoogled Chromium or lynx. Lynx warns “bad html” but it renders fine....
Wouldn’t it be cool if we made a wiki list of every action we as a society/individual can take against climate change?
cross-posted from: lemmy.ca/post/15354536...